About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Friday, 9 November 2012

Blood On The Coal

A Disaster Waiting To Happen: Why was it that for nine years the party in power, a party with its roots in the coal mines of the West Coast, failed to introduce the "belt and braces" safety regulations so crucial to a modern mining industry? Why was Labour, of all parties, so slow to repair the deregulatory damage inflicted upon the industry by the National Party in the early 1990s?

IT WAS A SPARK igniting lethal levels of methane gas that
killed the twenty-nine Pike River miners. But, as the grim report of the Royal
Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy makes clear, the immediate cause
of the disaster is of less interest than the manifold failures which allowed the
spark and the gas to meet.

Other New Zealanders will write about the failure of the
Pike River Coal Company to adequately care for its employees’ safety. Much will
be said about the bureaucratic failings of the Department of Labour. There will
be critical scrutiny of the National Government’s decision to disband the Mine
Inspectorate.

But the name of this column is ‘From the Left’, so my focus
will be on the party of the workers; the party whose founders came from the
West Coast pits around Blackball; the party of the coal miners’ trade unions;
the party which for nine long years did nothing to prevent the tragedy which,
in such a criminally deregulated environment, was only ever a matter of time.

Labour took control of New Zealand’s state apparatus on 27
November 1999 and relinquished it on 8 November 2008. During that time three
Labour MPs held the Labour portfolio: Margaret Wilson (1999-2004); Ruth Dyson
(2005-07); and Trevor Mallard (2007-08).

All three of these politicians came into Parliament with
strong left-wing credentials. And all of them, I’m sure, wanted to do only good
things for the people they represented. How, then, are we to explain their
inaction? Their failure to impose a state-of-the-art health-and-safety
regulatory regime on New Zealand’s coal-mining industry?

Throughout
the nineteenth century, the dangers facing workers underground, and the disasters
which so regularly took their lives, provided a powerful moral impetus for
labour movements all over the world – including New Zealand’s. In 2007 workers’
safety campaigner, Hazel Armstrong, wrote: “The 1890s’ West Coast coalfields
have been evocatively described as a ‘slough of despond’. They were notoriously
hazardous working environments: ‘There’s always blood on the coal’, miners
said.” It’s why the story of Paddy Webb’s 1908 fight for the Blackball miners’
rights became as ingrained as coal-dust in the political memory of Labour Party
people. How could three successive Labour Ministers have forgotten so much?

Roots: The Labour Party traces its origins to the bitter industrial struggles of West Coast coal miners in the early years of the 20th Century.

The
late Bruce Jesson offers a plausible explanation in his 1999 book Only Their Purpose Is Mad: “Somehow or
other, the politicians … had been persuaded that politics is an irrational and
harmful activity. This followed from the firmly held Treasury belief that the
marketplace is the source of rational behaviour ….. It is assumed that
politicians will always bring an irrational influence to bear on events, not
just because they are irrational, but simply because they come from outside the
marketplace.”

This
became an article of faith for the “Rogernomes” of the fourth Labour Government,
and in spite of the many ideological and electoral challenges of the 1990s (not
least from the Alliance and NZ First) it remained the core assumption of most
members of Helen Clark’s cabinet. There was no appetite in the Clark-led Labour
Government for a return to the so-called “heavy-handed” regulations of the
past. As the source of rational behaviour, the market was still considered
uniquely capable of regulating itself. Tragically, it has taken the Pike River
disaster to expose the fatal falsity of that belief.

Following
the Royal Commission Report’s release, Labour leader, David Shearer, was asked
if he thought the deregulatory pendulum had swung too far. Mr Shearer responded
by saying that “the government needs to be much more hands on than it has
been”.

It is
to be hoped that these words reflect a genuine change of heart on Labour’s
part, and that the next time they’re in office, Labour politicians will not
hesitate to prevent the private sector’s “drive for production” (and profits) from
pushing workers’ rights to effective workplace protection off the agenda.

Because
if there’s “blood on the coal” at Pike River – Labour helped to put it there.

This essay was originally published in The
Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The
Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 November
2012.